Re: Beginner's Language?

[a.krennmair@aon.at (Andreas Krennmair)]

Friedrich Dominicus <frido@q-software-solutions.com> wrote:
>  "Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com> writes:
> > 
> > If you are familiar with Lisp, try this: Write a small program to read in a
> > couple of numbers from a keyboard, do some math with them and print the
> > result to the screen.
>  Gosh, how much simpler as in Lisp can it be? No declarations, no
>  puzzling about counting probably etc etc.
The problem is that Lisp is in no way similar to a natural language. And 
natural language can be understood easier than some functional, theoretical
stuff with a unique concept like Lisp. Don't get me wrong, Lisp is a great
language, and I personally find it quite exciting as four year Pascal and
two year C/C++ programmer, but it's hardly usable for teaching, because it
is so unique (well, you _could_ to functional programming in C, but it would
be considered bad style).

I currently go to an Austrian school where mostly programming/CS/software
engineering-related things are taught (it's for 5 years, and you start
at an age of 14), and we started programming in Pascal. I was bored in
the beginning, because I already knew Pascal, but then the teacher explained
me that they chose to teach Pascal because it is so easy to read and to
understand and it still has so many things common with other languages.
Of course, in the second year, you do some Lisp and Prolog, which confuses
quite a lot of people, but after a week or so, they usually get it (at least
I did with Lisp :).

> > Now look at it. Could a neophite with literally *zero*
> > experience in programming computers read it and stand a chance of
> > understanding what it does or how it does it?
>  
>  yes, yes 
for my comment, see above. Lisp has hardly anything in common with natural
languages. Or could you express "My girlfriend's name is Suzy and her age
is 17" as readable as this in Lisp:
$girlfriend{'name'} = "Suzy";
$girlfriend{'age'} = 17;

Of course, this is not the best example, since Perl has a syntax that is
not the optimum for beginners.

> > Could a neophite duplicate it
> > easily or modify it to do something different?
>  yes
No. Only after understanding the fundamental concepts of Lisp.

> >Is it intuitively obvious to
> > even the most casual observer how to make a similar program?
>  yes
No. See answer before. :)

>  A beginner is not biased in any way and so it doe not matter what
>  he/she started from. If he starts with Lisp; C, Java looks messy. If
It _does_ matter. Beginners can easily get frustrated because of the
sometimes confusing syntax. BTW, I wouldn't recommend starting with Java
or C/C++, either. I'd recommend and teach (if I were a teacher :) some
Wirth language, because they're designed especially for teaching basics
of programming.

Best regards,
Andreas Krennmair
-- 
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